to have been begun before she could,
strictly, have been held responsible; none the less her madness must
have been in the air, otherwise it is difficult to account for the
joint and simultaneous overthrow of two young gentlemen of taste and
quality, by Miss Tishy Mangan.

Georgy, aged but 19, just home from far and forlorn seas, with, as the
poet says, a heart for any fate, might have been excused for
swallowing any good provided for him by the gods, whole, and without
criticism, but for Mr. St. Lawrence Coppinger, lately come of age, a
man of taste, endowed with special _finesse_ of feeling, it might
have been expected that a highly-coloured peacock butterfly would have
had but scant appeal. In fact, one is driven back upon the young May
Moon as the sole plausible explanation of the fact that, on that
afternoon of bewitchment, Tishy Mangan went to Larry's head.

These temporary aberrations are afflictions for which the most refined
young men must occasionally be prepared, and Larry's overthrow was not
without justification. Quite apart from her looks--and anyone would
have been forced to admit that they were undeniable--there was her
voice, the true contralto _timbre_, thick and mellow, dark and
sweet, like heather honey, he thought, while he and Georgy sprawled on
the grass at her feet (and she had good feet) making very indifferent
jokes, in that exaggerated travesty of an Irish brogue which is often
all that an English school will leave with Irish boys, and vicing with
each other in the folly proper to such an occasion.

"I don't see your shoe-buckles!" Larry said, looking from her feet to
her lips, with a meaning and impudent lift of his blue eyes. "Have you
given up wearing them?"

Tishy's colour deepened; she remembered instantly what she was meant
to remember.

"You're regretting the choice you made, are you?" she said, with a
toss of her head. "Never fear! The buckles will be there when they're
wanted!"

"Don't trouble about them!" says Larry, tremendously pleased with his
success as a flirtatious man of the world; "I don't think they will be
required!"

It is necessary to have attained to a reasonably advanced age to be
able to recognise pathos in the fatuities that so frequently form a
feature of love's young dream. Christian, listening with one ear to
her brother and cousin, while into the other the genuine idiom of her
native land flowed, ardently, from the now unsealed lips of Barty
Mangan, beg